1900 BeLight Software's Art Text is something of a one-trick pony, but it's a great trick and the program executes it extremely well. It's more an exceptionally easy-to-use utility program to produce graphic art work to be used in projects in other programs than to produce finished documents.

With Art Text, you can transform any piece of computer text into styled and textured, highly artistic titles, headings, logos, icons, banners and more, and it is indeed art. The application's set of tools lets you express your imagination, creativity, and sense of design freely, and have a lot of fun doing it.

Art Text taps into Mac OS X's powerful Core Image graphics technology and text rendering and styling features, facilitating your easily modifying any texts and vector shapes into arresting graphic images. which can be exported in a range of formats for use in logos, letterheads, brochures, flyers, postcards, business cards, icons and websites.

The Art Text interface window uses the familiar three-box motif, with its work area and preview window at the top left, the the text options controls and buttons below that, and the tool and library displays at the right side, such as five different color pickers to use for fill, stroke, and background color.

The program has a library of built-in effects, over 110 pre-designed styles, including Web 2.0 styles, and a collection of 50 Bitstream fonts. is also included with the shrinkwrap version. A collection of 460 supplied vector icons is included as well. It takes quite a while to thoroughly review all of the built-in options, but you should be able to find something suitable to your immediate needs in a hurry if necessary.

In Art Text you can work with text and vector images, toggling back and forth between Text panel and Vector Shapes panel by clicking the arrow in the corner.

The Text panel has an editing box and text formatting controls. You can type text from scratch and format it before applying effects, as well as kerning, line spacing, and backgrounds.

You can also copy text from other programs using cut and paste. Pasted text will preserve its original formatting. Art Text supports multi-line text, and comes with a collection of vector images displayed on the Vector Shapes panel. You can load your own images as well. For this, drag the graphic file from Finder into the box or click the Load Custom button and specify the path.

Art Text's effects are separated into four groups:
• Fill and Stroke
• Shadow and Glow
• Materials
• Transformation

Using the "Fill and Stroke" panel, you can control Color and texture, while the Stroke Effect apples outlines to text and vector shapes.

The Shading Pro tool offers the ability to cover/shade anything with shading material, plus ability to create your own.

Shadow, Glow and Background are what they sound like, giving you further options for styling your text.

"Materials" can be selected from a palette and applied to your text image adding three-dimensional, glassy, metal, plastic, etc. looks. More than 100 materials are built into the program You can also create your own materials using Art Text's Editor of Materials window to customize light sources and materials, and textures.

Light Sources effects may include additional specular light, ambient color, diffuse color, and main specular light, which is is light reflected by the object in some direction appearing like a highlight from spotlight source.

Transformation effects create geometric distortion of text or a vector shapes from the internal library, although this option will not work with custom images.

A selection of shape templates is also supplied.

Most of the transformation effects have one or two slider bars that adjust distortion. Each image or text is displayed in a frame with handles. Moving the frame corner handles resizes the image or text proportionally. With the Shift key pressed, the proportion of sides will change. Moving the side handles of the frame changes width or height of the content. With the Option key pressed, you can also scale the frame from the middle, rather than from the side, allowing you a virtually unlimited range of potential shapes, contours and orientations.
arttext2.jpg
Once you've arrived at a result that suits you, its effects can be saved as a style, which will allow you to process subsequent image subjects the same way. Custom Styles can also be used to save a set of object parameters as a work in progress for returning while you work on a new design in the meantime. The program also has has a set of pre-designed styles accessed from the Cocoa drawer on the right side of the Art Text interface window in categories like Line& Fill, Phone Buttons, Shaded, Shaded with Image, and Web 2 Style.

Your finished work can be printed to hard copy and/or exported as a PDF, EPS, TIFF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG graphics file or copied to the Clipboard and pasted into other applications.

You can specify the size of the export image. Depending on the effects you used, you can preserve and transfer a vector or raster image using the PDF format, which is the only format Art Text uses when copying to the Clipboard, to be used in applications like Preview and Photoshop Element which have built-in PDF rasterizing engines.

Art Text's great virtues are its user friendliness, ease of use, and immense versatility of built-in creative options.

There are also a few things to criticize. For example, there is no way to rotate text, although a vertical orientation option is included as a canned style. There is no a way to save a work in progress as a separate file, so you have to save it as a custom style, and the program quits when you close the interface window, which can be a bit disconcerting. There is also no style preview or thumbnail view provided, so you can only view a style in the main window, making the selection process a more cumbersome trial-and-error exercise than it might have been otherwise.

However, the program is inexpensive, and it almost effortlessly (if you wish) produces truly impressive and professional-looking results, and as a bonus, is fun. Highly recommended.

Art Text Key Features:
- collection of pre-designed styles to get you started;
- text and special artwork content (about 460 pictograms) as a source;
- shading pro tool (ability to cover/shade anything with shading material - any object can get the glassy, plastic or metallic look, it is also possible to add the effect of smooth or rough surface to any of the objects);
- option to fill and outline text or artwork with different colors, gradients or textures;
- apply shadow and glow effects;
- ability to combine text with background image;
- bend text using 20 adjustable vector transformation shapes or bezier splines;
- ability to export into a file or clipboard in TIFF, JPEG, EPS, PDF, PNG or other formats.

Art Text 1.2.2 version changes:
- 30 ready-made styles were added.
- 22 new materials become available.
- Added spotlight controls bring convenience to creation of custom materials.
- Program stability improved.
- Kerning and line spacing problems in text editing panel fixed.
- Improper export of an image with a background fixed. - Work with material editing dialog improved.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
* Mac OS X 10.4 or later
* 2.0 MB of available hard drive space
* Printer - inkjet or laser (optional)

Read the whole list of changes:
http://www.belightsoft.com/products/arttext/versch/versions.php

Fully functional Art Text demo is available at:
http://www.belightsoft.com/download/

Art Text is priced starting at $39.95.

For more information, visit:
http://www.belightsoft.com/arttext/

Available at The Apple Store, Micro Center Online, and Amazon.com

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